Microsoft’s Larry Lieberman recently in his blog wrote: “Today’s Windows Phone applications and games will run on the next major version of Windows Phone. “

I think Microsoft should promise like this, otherwise they will lost lots of programmers. Current there are some situations let .NET programmers and Windows Phone programmers confused, they all have a question: whether they need to continue some Microsoft tech such as Silverlight and WPF since HTML5 has come, especially Windows 8 final version is also coming.

In Larry Lieberman’s old blog about “Windows 8 and the Windows Phone SDK”, he listed three main issues with running current Windows Phone SDK on Windows 8 Consumer Preview:

1: XNA Game Studio. On an attempt at installing the Windows Phone SDK, the user will receive error messages with regard to components of the XNA tool chain. These components will fail to install on Windows 8; the workaround for this has been blogged about by Aaron Stebner.

2: Windows Phone Emulator. Windows 8 cannot currently run the Windows Phone emulator, which will make it very difficult to debug your code. There are two issues in addition to the simple fact that the emulator does not run on Windows 8, having to do with specific emulator functionality.

3:.NET 3.5. Capability.exe and slsvcutil.exe will not run on Win 8 unless you separately install .NET 3.5.

However, “per the first point above”, Microsoft “will be enabling the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 on Windows 8 in the coming months.” (please read Larry Lieberman first blog about “Windows 8 and the Windows Phone SDK”)

In April 05, 2012, Larry Lieberman posted the 2nd article about “Windows 8 and the Windows Phone SDK”, the part 2.

In the new post, he gave some answers based on his 1st post.

1: Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update is now available and enables Windows Phone developers to do two things: “Develop apps that work well on the new 256 MB devices, Use the WPSDK 7.1 to develop on machines running Windows 8” (see here).

2: Today’s Windows Phone applications and games will run on the next major version of Windows Phone;

3: About the long term future of Silverlight for Windows Phone: “Please don’t panic; XAML and C#/VB.NET development in Windows 8 can be viewed as a direct evolution from today’s Silverlight. All of your managed programming skills are transferrable to building applications for Windows 8, and in many cases, much of your code will be transferrable as well.”

Seems there is few help information on internet that how to import an existing SQL Server data table structure into Microsoft Visio 2010, or there are some information, but when you read them, you are always confused because most of them missed some important steps.

OK, now people are using Microsoft Office 2010, so the Visio version is 2010. If you want to import existing SQL Server 2008 data table structures, you have to do 2 main steps:

7: In the next screen, if you do not need change the options, just click Finish button:

8: Now you have a chance to test data source, or you just click OK button to close the Window, you will back to Data Source Administrator screen, and you can see the new data source has already created, please click OK button here to finally save!

Step 2: Import SQL Server data table structures in Visio 2010:

1: Open Visio 2010, Create a new project using “Database Moel Diagram” under “Software and Database Template”

2: Select Database menu and choose “Reverse Engineer” icon:

3: Select “Installed Visio drivers” and try to choose the data sources which you created in Step 1;

However, you might can not see the same that you just created, just like below screen shot.

The reason is you are using Windows 7 64-bit system, I think this is the Windows 7 64-bit’s bug: Actually when you opened the “Set up data sources (ODBC)” in step 1, it opened a ODBC32-bit program, here you have to manually open the 64-bit program, which is C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe. When you open it, please repeat all steps in Step 1;

Now when you check Installed Visio drivers data source, you will see the data source which you added:

4: Click Next button and input user and password for connecting data source

5: Select object types, just click Next button here:

6: Select tables that you want to import:

7: Keep the default selections and click Next button:

8: Final review and click Finish button:

9: finally, we can see now the SQL Server data tables are imported in Visio 2010:

If you are using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008, you should know the UAC (User Account Control), this is one of significant differences between Windows XP and the newer Windows System.

“User Account Control (UAC) determines the privileges of a user. If you are a member of the Built-in Administrators group, you are assigned two run-time access tokens: a standard user access token and an administrator access token. By default, you are in the standard user role. When you attempt to perform a task that requires administrative privileges, you can dynamically elevate your role by using the Consent dialog box. The code that executes the IsInRole method does not display the Consent dialog box. The code returns false if you are in the standard user role or in the Built-in Administrators group. You can elevate your privileges before you execute the code by right-clicking the application icon and indicating that you want to run as an administrator.” – From MSDN.

When you build a Windows Form application using C#, your application will not run as administrator by default. Then if your application need more permissions just like an Administrator, you might get problem since your application can not access enough resources;

The simplest solution is disabling the UAC on your Windows system. About how to disable UAC, we will discuss in another time, this time we do not want to talk about more about this since disabling UAC for a windows system is not recommended.

The normal and the best solution is using manifest file.

Open your application in Visual Studio 2010, Right click the project and add a new item, choose “Application Manifest File”:

Now you can see a new file named “app.manifest” is added under Properties folder:

When you open app.manifest file, you can see there are some sample settings have been already there, for example:

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

Microsoft developers should be exiting for the news now. Kinect is a really super product of Microsoft. Developers can write much more Kinect projects using the SDK now. Also, there might be more open source projects based on Kinect.

Microsoft announce that anyone can use this SDK Beta for their personal programming interests. However, The SDK Beta is licensed under the terms of the license agreement for Microsoft Kinect for Windows SDK Beta from Microsoft Research. The SDK Beta is licensed for non-commercial use only.

When you click your Windows 7 “Start” button and click the triangle icon on the right side of “Shut down” button, you can see a list of menu items, which includes Sleep, Hibernate, Hybrid Sleep (recommended for desktop PC).

By the way if you can not see the “Hibernate” menu item, you have to check some reasons such as whether your video card supports sleep (maybe you have to update your video card driver), or you have to check your BIOS settings, or you don’t have admin permission, or you have turned on “Hybrid Sleep”:

How to set your power plan:

Go to Control Panel and under Hardware and Sound, choose Power Options, or you just input “Sleep” in the search box when you open Control Panel:

Click “Change plan Settings”, in the next screen click “Change advanced power settings”

Then you can see the “Sleep” setting, please expand Sleep node as below, you can set your sleep plan here, and Allow hybrid sleep or not, note if you allow hybrid sleep, you will not see Hibernate menu item in menu list which we mentioned on the beginning of this article.

The differences:

OK, now you know how to set the power plan, and you might have known all the three menu items should be used for that computer to be a kind of “power safe” status. However, what the exact difference among them?

To be short, Sleep is just like you go to sleep but you do not turn off all your lights, you can wake up anytime without needing of turn on all lights which you need; Hibernate is also the case of you go to sleep, but you turned off as most lights as possible you can turned off before you go to sleep, which it can save your most power; Hybrid Sleep is another kind of power saving option, it between Sleep and Hibernate, you just turned off part of your lights before you go to sleep.

For more technically explain the differences, we copied the content from Microsoft official site:

Sleep is a power-saving state that allows a computer to quickly resume full-power operation (typically within several seconds) when you want to start working again. Putting your computer into the sleep state is like pausing a DVD player—the computer immediately stops what it’s doing and is ready to start again when you want to resume working.

Hibernation is a power-saving state designed primarily for laptops. While sleep puts your work and settings in memory and draws a small amount of power, hibernation puts your open documents and programs on your hard disk, and then turns off your computer. Of all the power-saving states in Windows, hibernation uses the least amount of power. On a laptop, use hibernation when you know that you won’t use your laptop for an extended period and won’t have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time.

Hybrid sleep is designed primarily for desktop computers. Hybrid sleep is a combination of sleep and hibernate—it puts any open documents and programs in memory and on your hard disk, and then puts your computer into a low-power state so that you can quickly resume your work. That way, if a power failure occurs,Windows can restore your work from your hard disk. When hybrid sleep is turned on, putting your computer into sleep automatically puts your computer into hybrid sleep. Hybrid sleep is typically turned on by default on desktop computers.

Move mouse on task bar on the bottom of your Windows 7, right click , you will see “Show the desktop” menu items, Click it when you want to show desktop.

When you come to desktop, the “Show the desktop” menu item will changed to “Show open widows” so that you can switch back to your previous windows.

Way 2: The most simple way: Click the rectangle area which indicates show desktop

Please check your windows 7 task bar carefully, just on the right bottom corner, there is a small and some transparent rectangle, which indicates Show Desktop, When you click it, the desktop will show, click one more time, system switches to your previous window; when your mouse hang over it, the desktop will show at once, when your mouse moves always, it will come back to your current window.

You also have other ways to get the show desktop, but we don’t think they make sense for you. The 2 ways above should be your best and common ways.

When we ran a Windows Form program and after we closed it, we got a message windows below:

“Windows detected that this program did not run correctly

To try and fix the problem, Windows has applied compatibility settings to this program, Windows will use these settings the n3ext time you run the program

If you noticed that this program didn’t run correctly, try running the program again … Location: C:\Program Files(x86)\Micro…\devenv.exe”

What is the Program Compatibility Assistant?

The Program Compatibility Assistant detects known compatibility issues in older programs. After you have run an older program in this version of Windows, it notifies you if there is a problem and offers to fix it the next time you run the program. If the compatibility issue is serious, the Program Compatibility Assistant might warn you or block the program from running. If that happens, you’ll have the option to check online for possible solutions.

But don’t worry the Windows Program Compatibility will NOT modify the program, it just change something in Windows so that Windows can run the program correctly.